Schizophrenia

'This disorder makes you a stranger in a strange land'. Schizophrenia, a psychotic disorder characterized by loss of contact with the environment, by noticeable deterioration in the level of functioning in everyday life. 1 Public Health Agency of Canada did a study showing that 1 in 100 people will develop schizophrenia in their life time. This essay will focus on breaking down the different aspects of the disorder.

Schizophrenia is often broken down into 5 main types Paranoid, Disorganized, Catatonic, Undifferentiated and Residual. These are all subtypes of schizophrenia. Often patients diagnosed with Paranoid subtype are more functional in a workplace and have an easier time engaging in relationships. Most often people with this subtype do not exhibit time symptoms until later in life.

Disorganized as the name implies is a subtype with the main feature being disorganization of their thought processes. People who suffer from this subtype of the illness often can not cope with daily life often losing their jobs. They also have a very hard time keeping and making new relationships. Even routine tasks become difficult such as dressing, bathing and brushing their teeth. The patient often suffers impairment of emotional processes, their emotions often seem random and unstable .The the most predominant features in the catatonic subtype are the disturbances in movement. Patients effected show a dramatic drop in activity to the point that voluntary movement becomes comes to a complete stand still. This is called a Catatonic Stupor, Sometimes patients may have a complete turn around and activity will dramatically increase this is a state known as a catatonic excitement. Often actions that appear relatively purposeless but are repea...

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...because he focused his studies on young adults with dementia.

The Swiss psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler created the term we know as schizophrenia in 1911. he also made the distinction between negative and positive symptoms. He changed the name after it was discovered the illness was not dementia because it did not always lead to mental deterioration and could occur late as well as early in life. The word “schizophrenia” is Greek schizo meaning split and phrene meaning mind, this describes the fragmented thinking of those diagnosed with the disorder. The term schizophrenia was to convey the idea of split or multiple personality, a common misunderstanding. Both Bleuler and Kraupelin divided schizophrenia into categories, based off of symptoms and prognoses. Over the years doctors and scientist have refined and continued to attempt to classify the types of schizophrenia.